Freedom can also be productive: the historical inversions of ‘the conduct of conduct’

ABSTRACT

The Foucauldian conception of power as ‘productive’ has left us so far with a residual conception of freedom. The article examines a number of historical cases in which ‘relationships of freedom’ have potentially come into existence within Western culture, from ‘revolution’ and ‘political truth-telling’ to ‘cynicism’ and ‘civility’. But the argument is not just about demonstrating that there have in fact been many historical inversions of ‘the conduct of conduct’. It is about theorizing how freedom can be ‘productive’ or give rise to cultural norms if any such inversion can only come into being as an event in itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Foucault
• Judith Butler
• Arendt
• parrhesia
• performativity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The relative historicist depth of Foucault when compared to Arendt is well addressed and clarified, if somewhat indirectly, by Claire Blencowe (2010).

2. The reference to a skeptical ‘capacity’ is used here for the sake of clarity, but, as mentioned before, Foucault refers to a much more ‘ontological condition’ or immanent potential, and, therefore, as I briefly discuss in the conclusion, it could serve as the basis of many different capabilities and ways of giving shape to a subject. Foucault invokes our capacity for skepticism precisely to avoid reifying one or other form of the subject. Skepticism has value for him, but it is not because one can assign to the ones who become skeptical in historically unforeseeable ways a specifiable type of moral worth – such as a Socratic norm of ‘respect for open-mindedness and ongoing investigation’ (see e.g. Vogt 2012). The skeptical response only offers a ‘strategic’ value (Foucault 2000, p. 347).

3. Even though I allude to Cynicism as a possible critical inference of Foucault’s sociological approach and even though his late studies demonstrate a clear interest in Ancient skepticism (Foucault 2012, p. 190), it must be emphasized that the skeptical capacity he theorizes is in principle disconnected from Skepticism as an epistemological position or doctrine. Such a ‘capacity’ simply captures the possibility that any individual, regardless of belief or philosophical system, would have of considering alternative options or ways of thinking about a proposition of conduct. This kind of capacity is rather irrelevant from the perspective of ancient skeptics such as Sextus Empiricus (Vogt 2012, p. 150–151). What the Foucauldian and Ancient figures of the skeptic do share, however, is a difficulty in conceptualization since, without adhering to at least certain minimal beliefs (or parameters of conduct mediated by power), a skeptic cannot think (Vogt 2012, ch.6). In the received intepretation of Foucault, power has come to be equated so closely to the normative itself that Butler for example resolves that if all freedom must be performed through inherited normative notions, then the relevant question is how to effect resistance in complicity (Butler 1997b, p. 29–30). The way I can go beyond this residual interpretation of freedom in this paper is by taking seriously the insight recently posed by Paul Kottman (2016), of whether ‘there really is such a thing as “power” under which all kinds of social and cultural norms can be subsumed and understood’ (emphasis added).

4. Only in the rather figurative case of Pericles one sees a governor who governs through parrhesia (Foucault 2011, p. 176–177). But, in general, the practice of parrhesia is simply the agonistic game of discursive confrontation by which the citizens of the polis can achieve the virtuous ascendancy that is required to govern with democratic legitimacy (ibid., pp. 157–158). The right to govern is gained through ‘imprecation’, by letting the weak confront the powerful (ibid., p. 135).

5. While Foucault uses a variation of the term ‘reflection’ when he defines ethics as ‘the considered [réfléchie] practice of freedom’ (Foucault 1997, p. xxv), in his case this terminology has the opposite function to the one I intend to give it here. For Foucault, it serves to qualify – as its tense for example reveals – the practice of freedom as always being an already calculated exercise of conduct.

6. In this sense, my use of ‘reflection’ is diametrically opposed to that of anthropologist David Graeber, who uses it to differentiate ‘the power to act directly on others’, or what he calls ‘action’, from ‘the power to define oneself in such a way as to convince others how they should act toward you’ (Graeber 2001, p. 104). The way a woman or a king persuades others to treat them in a certain way through a calculated display of the self is for Graeber a form of power that can be defined, rather cross-culturally, as a matter of ‘reflection’ (ibid., pp. 94–99). In our case, acting upon others through this cross-cultural form of relating to self still belongs to the sphere of the conduct of conduct (see Dean 1995).

7. For Foucault, the ‘conduct’ of ‘conduct’ is a suitable definition for power in contemporary academic debates to the extent that it can be derived in a historicist fashion from the thought of Western culture itself as a form of problematization relevant to our modern experience (Foucault 2007b, p. 193). What started as a pastoral concern with the thorough management of souls for the sake of salvation eventually translated, after the crisis of the Christian pastorate, into a pervasive secular concern with adequate government in general. The sixteenth century was witness to an explosion of ‘needs of conduct’ (Foucault 2007b, p. 231) at all societal levels of authority, a problematization that by the eighteenth century had been consolidated into a recognizable political project for rendering entire populations ‘governmentable’ (Foucault 2008, p.294) or guidable towards a collaborative form of conduct in spite of their own interests and passions.

8. This is a distinction that goes beyond the one Foucault draws between ‘morality’ and ‘subjectivation’ (see e.g. Luxon 2008, p. 388–391) and that rather approximates the one I have drawn in another context between ‘ethics’ and ‘strategics’ (Palacios 2018).

9. For this conclusion, I am borrowing the distinction between an absolute and relative telos drawn by Dean and Villadsen (2016, p. 142). While they apply it critically to the analysis of Foucault’s work on liberal politics and civil society (as a way of ascribing to him a certain teleological remainder), my point is that such a distinction can become important and acquire consistency once the possibility of relationships of freedom has been opened up as a tenable field of concerns within the Foucauldian tradition.

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Carlos Palacios

Carlos Palacios has just completed his PhD in sociology, supervised by Mitchell Dean at Macquarie University. His work has most recently appeared in the journal History of the Human Sciences. He is currently working on a monograph titled ‘Painfully Humanitarian: Modernity’s Intellectual Struggle with its own Radicalism’.